Deprivation
by Mousme
Summary: Sam is fading, one sense at a time, and no one quite knows how to fix it. Mild spoilers for Seasons 4 & 5.


Title: **Deprivation**  
Prompt: From a prompt by the lovely and talented **pkwench** : One of the boys is losing a sense at a time. A taste of blood, then nothing. A horrible sound, a terrible sight ... you get the idea. Eventually, all that remains is the sense of touch and they're soon praying that it's gone too. Another one written for the horror comment-fic meme.  
Spoilers: Minor for Season 4.  
Word Count: 2,347  
Warnings: Not much to warn for, actually. Sam's in his own head a lot.  
Disclaimer: _Nihil me impune lacessit!_ Uh, I mean, they don't belong to me. *shifty eyes*  
Neurotic Authorial Disclaimer: **pkwench** needs to stop prompting things. I'll never get anything else done for the rest of my life.  
Neurotic Authorial Disclaimer #2: Unbeta'd and written during a slow period at work in the middle of the night. Broken grammar and miserable syntax are to be expected.  
Neurotic Authorial Disclaimer #3: Apparently I'm on a serious let's-hurt-Sam kick. I may eventually get back to Dean, or maybe really mix things up and bring in another character entirely. Excitement abounds!

**Taste**

"You going to eat that or keep turning it into a valuable work of abstract art?" Dean waggles his fork in the general direction of Sam's plate.

Sam gives the plate a shove toward the middle of the table. "You can have it, if you want."

"Dude, it's salad."

Sam shrugs. It tastes of cardboard. Nothing tastes right anymore. Maybe demon blood messes with your taste buds. That would just be the icing on the apocalyptic cake. Not that he's ever enjoyed the very special relationship Dean has with his food, but he does actually have things he likes eating, and it's really depressing to have everything he puts in his mouth turn to ash.

"What's with you? You aren't still brooding about that whole Famine thing, are you? 'Cause I thought we dealt with that."

He flinches at Dean's tone, shakes his head. "No, I'm not. Well, not right now," he tries for a smile, but it feels weak, even to him. "The salad's just really crappy. Nothing worse than that."

He gets a derisive snort as an answer. "That's 'cause it's a _salad_, Sammy. No way any normal person can derive pleasure from lettuce, oil and vinegar. It's not natural. Here, you can have my fries," he offers in a rare show of generosity.

It seems churlish to refuse, and so he manages to choke down the fries without looking like he's about to gag. They're hot and sort of mushy, but they don't taste of anything, which is weird because they do smell like they ought to taste good. They're in the kind of small greasy diner that's been using the same oil in the deep fryer for two decades, and while the thought makes Sam want to puke on an intellectual level, viscerally he knows that's the kind of thing that makes the best kind of fries. Maybe it's because they remind him of Ruby. _Deep-fried crack_, she'd say. He finishes the fries because he doesn't want to hurt Dean's feelings, and he knows he has to eat.

He chalks it up to bad food for a while, but after three towns and more restaurants, diners and take-out places than he can count on the fingers of one hand, he eventually has to admit to himself that it's not the food. It's him.

It's always him.

**Smell**

It takes him more time to figure out the second loss. It's not like he spends a lot of time thinking about what anything smells like. He's too busy wondering about the fact that he can't seem to taste anything at all: not food, not the salt and cordite once he's fired off a few rounds with a shotgun, not the shampoo he accidentally gets in his mouth in the shower.

"Okay," Dean says one night when they're standing over a half-empty grave. They're both covered in sweat, they've been digging for hours, and they've got at least another couple of hours' digging before they'll reach the casket. Digging up graves is long, gruelling, and kind of thankless, especially when you have to fill them right back up again. "Milly here's only been buried about ten days, and I for one am pretty sick of smelling like putrefying corpse for days on end. Rock-paper-scissors?"

Sam tilts his head in tacit agreement, and deliberately throws paper. Dean's eyes widen in shock, his expression almost wounded that Sam has gone and changed the rules of engagement on him, but he recovers swiftly and whoops with triumph.

"Hah! Good old scissors," he grins, and picks up the shovel.

Two hours later, and Sam is knee-deep in the coffin, sprinkling salt over the bloated corpse of Milly Freeman. Dean is standing a couple of paces away from the grave, and Sam can hear him gagging.

"Dude, that is seriously gross," his voice wafts over the edge of the grave. "I don't think we've had one this bad since that farm in Milwaukee six months ago. Ugh. How are you not puking? I want to puke and I'm way over here."

He's pouring lighter fluid on the body, taking care not to splash himself. "I can't smell anything," he says, and his stomach flip-flops as the words leave his lips.

"Seriously?"

"Yeah."

"Lucky you," Dean loses the battle with his own stomach, and Sam hears the sound of retching.

He sighs, climbs out of the grave, drops a lit match into the shadows and watches them come alive while his mind crawls with half-formed thoughts like insects.

"I'm not so sure," he says softly.

**Sight**

Dean's inclination is to treat it like another hunt. Once it's obvious that it's not some fluke, some freak circumstance that's going to get better on its own, he starts them researching. Calls up Bobby, calls up all their remaining contacts, and Sam tries very hard not to be depressed that they can count those people on the fingers of one hand. Dean buries him in books, pointedly ignoring the other hunts that come their way. In some ways, Dean is even more stubborn than Sam is, and once he's got his teeth in something he's like a Jack Russell Terrier with a bone. Right now he's got his sights on fixing Sam, whatever's wrong with him, and come hell or high water, that's what they're doing.

"It's not that big a deal," Sam manages a half-hearted protest early on in the process.

"Not a big deal my ass," Dean growls at him. "I'm sick of watching you pick at your food and turn eating into complex performance art because you can't taste any of it. We're going to fix this, and when you're back to normal, then we'll go back to hunting proper monsters that I can salt and burn the way is right and good and proper."

Sam snorts, but he can't hide his relief. "All right. But I reserve the right to complain about how terrible your socks smell when you forget to do the laundry next time."

"You wish, bitch."

"Jerk."

Sam trips on the curb heading toward the library, and it's only thanks to Dean's quick reflexes that he doesn't faceplant into the sidewalk. Dean's got him by the elbow, and Sam's not sure which of them is shaking harder. He straightens, shakes off the adrenaline rush brought on by nearly splitting open his skull on the pavement, gives Dean a thump on the shoulder at once to thank him and reassure him that he's fine.

About an hour into their latest round of research he's rubbing at his eyes, wishing that libraries would hire someone to dust the shelves every ten years or so. It couldn't hurt, anyway. There's nothing wrong with him. The text dances and flickers in mesmerizing patterns, spots and swirls. He can feel dry layers of dust on his tongue. He blinks at the text, willing it to stay in place, but the words blur and swim on the page, then vanish altogether. He blinks again, and the world stays dark.

"Dean," his voice breaks in spite of himself. "Dean... something's wrong."

**Sound**

He's kind of glad that he can't see. Rather, he's grateful that he can't see the fact that Dean is quietly freaking out while trying to pretend to hold it together. He can hear the tension in his brother's voice, practically feels it rolling off him whenever he gets close enough to touch. These days, Dean is close enough to touch a lot of the time. He makes terrible jokes about being a guide-dog, and calls Sam "Helen Keller," and doesn't say anything at all snarky when Sam points out that Helen Keller was both deaf and blind, because, really, what is there to say to that?

Predictably, the doctors are baffled. There's nothing physically wrong with him. Dean loses his temper at the first one who hints at the words "hysterical blindness," and Sam has to drag him away, and because he can't see where he's going he slams them both into a door and ends up with a three-inch laceration in his scalp. Dean wears his guilt like Joseph's fucking technicolour dreamcoat after that. He sticks like Velcro to Sam's elbow, talks him through his day, keeps up a stream of meaningless chatter as he steers him around obstacles and up flights of stairs and in and out of the Impala. He describes everything he's seeing in lurid and random detail, giving Sam more insight into the workings of his mind than he ever wanted.

Sam tries to become attuned to things other than what he can see. It's unnerving, because he can't tell what he's eating at all now, not unless Dean tells him: he can't smell it, can't taste it, can't see what it is. His only clue is the texture, and in the places they eat, that's not always enough of a clue. Only once he jokingly accuses Dean of lying to him about what's on his plate, but the way his brother falls silent is enough to make him never say anything like it ever again. He puts up with Dean's jokes about becoming like a "less douchebaggy" version of Dare Devil, tries to laugh in the right places, manages not to break down when Dean presses a cane into his hand that he knows is red and white. The whole world except me can see it, he thinks.

He learns to count his steps, to put his fork in his mouth without stabbing himself. Dean makes him focus on mundane tasks because he can't do much research anymore. They buy headphones, some fancy software that translates text into audio, and it helps a bit, but not much. Bobby's voice over the phone brings little comfort and no hope: they don't know what's causing it. Castiel remains silent, which is just fucking eerie. Then, eventually, Castiel stops coming altogether, which is even eerier, because Sam can barely tell the difference.

Because he can tell Dean is losing it, Sam tries harder and harder to keep it together. Doesn't mention the nights he spends awake, listening to his heart hammering away just under his ribs, the crawling sensation over his skin. The murmuring in his ears. The constant wondering.

One day, the wondering spills from his mouth before he can stop it. "Do you think I'm being punished?"

Dean doesn't answer.

When Sam wakes up one morning to silence, he curls into a ball and trembles.

**Touch**

Sam startles easily now. He can't tell when anyone is approaching. Every time Dean touches him he flinches, and he can imagine the emotions flickering over his brother's face each time: fear and guilt and anger and helplessness and maybe love, too. He can imagine them, but not see them. He doesn't know how long it's been since he's heard Dean's voice, because there's no way to tell the time.

He learns to tell the time of day by the texture of the food Dean feeds him. The slightly slimy consistency of eggs in the morning, or the squashy feel of slightly-cold pancakes. Soup is generally reserved for lunch, hot and liquid, and sometimes he feels noodles disintegrating against his tongue. Everything else is fair game. Sometimes he even manages to eat what's put in front of him.

His world has narrowed to the confines of his head. He can put out his hands, feel the contours of furniture, the rough weave of cheap motel blankets against his skin. The tile in the bathrooms is always the same, cold and slick with beading water, and he can't help but flinch as the spray from the shower hits his shoulders. Dean's hands are slick with soap and water, guiding him as best he can, and Sam wants to tell him that it's so fucking wrong that he can't smell the cheap perfume-y scent of the tiny bar of motel soap; that he misses the Impala, the way Dean's coat reminds him of home. He misses goddamned Metallica being played too loudly and Dean's deliberate off-key singing, and he misses watching his brother pull weird faces at him over the heads of clueless witnesses.

Things exist only if he touches them. Dean fades into nothingness when he removes his hand from Sam's elbow. At first Sam tries to shuffle from spot to spot, but he can't tell when he's going to run into something, or if the hot plate has been turned on, and he can't hear the warnings Dean yells at him. That Dean maybe yells at him. His world closes in, until he lets himself be shifted from spot to spot like a piece of broken luggage, and he sits on the chair or on the bed and draws up his knees to his chest, resting his head on his forearms. Dean stops trying to give him reassuring pats, because he jumps every time, and sometimes it frightens him so badly he thinks he might have a heart attack, and spends forever just gasping for breath, his shoulders heaving in a desperate bid for air.

He stops trying to touch things, stops trying to guess what lies under his fingertips. It's like trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle with only one piece. He won't talk, can't bear to do it when he can't know if Dean or anyone will answer him. He rests his head on his knees, the denim of his jeans scraping against his cheek, fingers laced behind his neck. His skin crawls constantly, thoughts bouncing off the insides of his head with nowhere to go. Dean could just leave him here, and he'd never know. Not for hours, or maybe days. Dean won't leave him, of course, but he could, and then he'd be alone with it. He swallows down a mouthful of bile and fear.

Tells himself he's imagining the coppery taste of blood on his tongue.


End file.
